The Codex Primus is the primary book that all readers should start with on this world of Koth site. The book explains how to best use the content to understand and enjoy this fantasy world.
Koth is somewhat of a unique world in that it aligns more with a swords and sorcery style of fantasy than high magic and fantastical role playing. My inspiration for this world is real medieval history mixed with some myth and legends for flavor.
The result is a very low magic world where the average commoner is never impacted by the arcane in their daily lives. What miracles they do see are performed by priests, sanctioned by an often oppressive noble class. Heroes are rare and evil is not a creature, devil or demon that will kill you in the night.
Evil is us, but so is good. Koth attempts to be as realistic as possible by merging our history with OSR systems for fighting, spell casting magic items and fantastic creatures. This isn’t as difficult as one might think and makes for some very fun storytelling.
The big bad evil guy isn’t a monster - it's more likely a faction in society or a religious order that happens to disagree with your point of view. The heroic savior of a town could just be some person passing through who did something that randomly produced a positive outcome. I created Koth to explore human nature through storytelling with my friends and I’ve always been surprised by just how interesting and dynamic this can be.
A key theme in Koth is that any individual or faction/group-think perspective is inherently limited. Understanding often requires engaging with others and listening to their perspectives. It is often necessary to seek out the truth of things far outside one’s comfort zone - somewhere between our own biases and the information provided to us by others. It is important to never accept simple answers and to always keep searching.
Much of what happens in Koth is a mystery to the players and the player characters. I created this fantasy world to require (or at least encourage) players to work together to find answers to questions that have meaning to them. Often I suggest that player characters have diverse backgrounds that result in conflict initially with the hope that they will grow beyond these biases if the narrative allows for it.
I admit this doesn't work out as well as I would like sometimes.
Koth may be a low magic fantasy setting but at its core it is just a space to tell a very human story with friends. This is my intention. Sometimes it is "murder hobo central" and the players get kill crazy but that's the nature of fantasty role playing games. At least in Koth when they do there are real consequences. I don't go easy on my players when I'm acting as game master!
If you continue reading this codex to better understand the world of Koth please start with the introduction. It explains much of the structure of documents and the intentional points of view (and biases) within the narrative.
If your goal is to skip all this and jump right into gaming - I've created two other guides with this in mind: the Game Master’s Guide and the Player’s Guide. Access these if you wish to learn more about some of the custom house rules and unique OSR aspects of the game world.
Thank you for taking an interest in Koth. I hope you enjoy what you find here.